. . . commonplace, ordinary, everyday

Books

19 June 2015

- One: there is no death; and two: the souls of those who've left the physical world are always with us...-

- He'd given in to temptation, and now he had to pay. -

- 'It's why you go on a fucking cruise, innit?' he droned on. 'To have a drink and a laugh. And if the ship's going to do a Titanic, then I wanna be as pissed up as possible.' -

- It's a shame musicians are no longer required to go down with the ship. -

- Curiously, although they now had each other in person, she missed receiving Elise's emails, and Elise admitted that she missed her messages, too. There was an intimacy in writing that was somehow absent from personal interactions, although she couldn't complain. -

18 June 2015

- I have pretended to go mad in order to tell you the things I need to. I call it art. -

- My apologies if I haven't written in a while. It's just that words ran out of letters (these are the last in the bag). It's just that language isn't perfect. It's just, me. -

- It says that there is no right way to feel but, right now, after something like this happens, you do need to feel however you're feeling and that feeling this way, however you're feeling, is healthy. -

04 June 2015

- So many question marks, their dots and their hooks float in the air, block my view of your beautiful face. And I say, yes, maybe there is. -

- He is going to kill and he is going to die. That's all we know for now, let's see what happens in between. -

- This time it's the road that has become a living thing curling up into the sky, then coming down to break his car window and swallow him. -

- My wife says your KG teacher is the one who knows you best because she knows you when you know nothing, she is the one who teaches you how to read, write, count and I never got to say thank you to you. -

- The shortest love story ever told is when a parent tells her child that she loves a man who is not her father. -

- Nina imagined that hell might be like this: being mauled by a tall woman in tight stonewashed jeans while her husband pointed out one's aesthetic shortcomings and spoke admiringly of an ectomorph. -

- You longed for someone to notice you, the real you inside, the one that had ideas and feelings, but people kept returning to your appearance instead, forcing it upon you, saying: 'This plump milkmaid is the real Nina. She is not glamorous or fascinating or clever, but she would look good on a milk cart, surrounded by her churns.' -

- She was not a subtle, nocturnally scented shrub. Dolly was one of those people who present themselves to the world as a permanent emergency. Nothing else is important, shrieks the permanent emergency, but my crisis, my pain, my need. -

- Nina had been inside old houses that had been stricken by the past. Something sad hung about the banisters or dangled from the cornices; you found yourself walking through unexplained cold patches; you felt relieved when you were out in the sunshine again. -

04 May 2015

- But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for. -

- Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the 'New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. -

- All men are mad in some way or the other, and insamuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world. -

- That way madness lies! -

- It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy, and reason so sound. -

16 April 2015

- Her mother's voice sounded through the hallway, mixing with the mustiness around her so well that the sound almost had a smell. To Jess, sitting in the cupboard, the sound of her name was strange, wobbly, misformed, as if she were inside a bottle, or a glass cube, maybe, and Mum was outside it, tapping. -

- Jess liked haiku. She thought they were incredible and really sort of terrible. She felt, when reading over the ones she'd written herself, as if she were being punched very hard, just once, with each haiku. -

- 'Maybe that's why you get so sad,' she said, 'because you're so clever.' -

- All my thoughts have left, / with her. / I thought I'd kept them in my head / But when I tried to find the thoughts / They all told me she was / dead. -

- Jess blinked. It was incredible that her mother could really believe that a mother's dreams, a mother's fears, were the same as her child's, as if these things could be passed on in the same way as her frizzy hair had been, or the shape of her nose. -

- Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. . . Only two people who are full up can be friends. They don't want anything from each other except friendship... -

14 April 2015

- Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work. -

- And when I think of the U2 pilot up there reading a book about King Arthur...I can't help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude. And the solitude of of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading The Once and Future King fifty thousand feet above the clouds - that makes my heart break just a little... -

- Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. -

- There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, thought you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are. -